Another baking experiment

So, this is a writeup of a cake-based experiment which now took place sufficiently long ago that I've almost completely forgotten about it, so if this writeup seems hazy on the details, that's why. The idea was to find the optimal combination of flake type, covering type and bit size for a chocolate/otherwise cornflake/otherwise cake. The combinations on trial were as follows:

• Milk chocolate, white chocolate, or melted marshmallow
• Corn flakes or bran flakes (bear with me)
• Full size flakes, or crushed up flakes.

The theory is that a) I've seen all three types of coating employed with almost unilateral success, b) bran flakes work REALLY well, since they're naturally sweet and it's a good way to hide fibre in your diet, and c) crushing up the corn flakes should in theory mean there's a higher chocolate to flake ratio, making the cakes chocolatier, which in truth can only be a good thing.

Overall the baking went well, and I was ably assisted by two other people,

who I'm sure wouldn't like to have their names associated with cookery on the internet. We had a great time crushing up cornflakes - I discovered the optimal implement to be the flat bottom of a wooden egg cup, but the end of a rolling pin came in second.

We then discovered that we'd prepared far too much cornflakes for the amount of chocolate we had. We pressed on regardless, and in retrospect probably should have put some of them back in the box. We'll do that next time - readers, I'm making mistakes here so you don't have to.

The next major discovery we made, apart from how awesome I am at making a Bain-Marie out of a bowl and a pan (skills I learned from my Mum; you never forget these kinds of things) was that marshmallow, when melted, goes FRICKING WEIRD. It becomes very sticky, and incredibly stringy, resisting all attempts to 1: transfer it from the container it's in to somewhere else and 2: mix with other substances easily. We eventually somehow subdued it enough to make it stick to some cereal products and stay in paper cases.

Overall, we basically ended up with a FRICKING SHEDLOAD of cereal based coated cake products, and kudos to the people of my immediate friends and the maths department for helping me to eat them all.

The conclusions we drew from the experiment were four-fold:

1. All of the cakes were pretty nice.
2. We could have done with more chocolate, or less cereal.
3. People avoided the bran flake ones, but when they did eat them, thought they were pretty nice.
4. Crushing up would be quite effective at making them stay together better, IF we'd used more chocolate. Which we didn't. So they crumbled everywhere.

Watch this space for further caking exploits, especially since I'm due to submit my corrections soon, at which point I'll have a LOT more free time (and thus will presumably start mucking around with baking again).